Effect of multiyear drought on upland sediment yield and subsequent impacts on flood control reservoir storage

Since the early 1950s, the U.S. Soil Conservation Service (SCS) and later the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service has built over 11,000 flood control reservoirs (FCR) in 47 states. FCR built in Texas and Oklahoma in the early 1950s to mid‐1950s were impounded during the most severe drought on record in the region. In this study, the sediment trapped in FCR is used to reconstruct the variation in sediment yield through the drought years to the present. New sediment surveys of four FCR in McCulloch County, Texas, are combined with three previous surveys by the SCS. The new surveys are conducted using acoustic profiling to map water depth and sediment thickness in submerged areas of the reservoirs and real‐time kinematic GPS in the dry areas. Sediment coring is used to determine sediment dry bulk density. The survey results are used to construct a composite history of the normalized sediment yield for the study area. Normalized sediment yield is the annual sediment yield normalized by the soil erodability factor K and the combined slope length and steepness factor LS of the watershed. The results indicate that sediment yield was lowest during the relatively drought‐free period from 1971 to 2007, averaging 4.2 t/ha/yr/unit K/unit LS and over 70 times higher during the early part of the 1950s drought from 1951 to 1953, averaging 300.3 t/ha/yr/unit K/unit LS. These results have important implications for predicting the remaining useful life of FCR in the region and planning for future droughts.